2024 Year-End Review

Seven years into this blog, I finally sat down and wrote my first annual review.

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Ever since I started this blog, I had wanted to write a proper year-end review. But every December, the moment I was about to begin, I would suddenly feel that my vocabulary was too poor, my memory too thin, and my real life too barren to deserve any special summary.
So I kept putting it off. The annual review existed only in my head, where it would stretch from the solar new year all the way to the lunar new year. Always planning. Never actually written.

This year, though, things changed. Thanks to twelve Monthly Logs, each delayed by roughly half a month, I actually have enough material to write a 2024 review.
Maybe too much material. It almost feels harder to know where to begin now (which is probably why this 2024 review slipped all the way into February 2025).

After thinking it over, I decided to follow the Monthly Log structure:

1. Input and Output: what I watched and what I did in 2024
2. Expenses: summarize my spending in 2024
3. Finally: some mindset changes

Input

Books

In 2024 I mostly read technical books. I’m a latecomer and my skills are weak, so I need to patch up the fundamentals.

• Beginner

  • 《网络是怎样连接的》、《计算机是怎样跑起来的》、《程序是怎样跑起来的》
    Three technical books written by Japanese authors. Easy to understand and highly recommended.

    Besides these three Japanese technical books, I also read 《インフラエンジニアの知識と実務がこれ1冊でしっかりわかる教科書》
    But after finishing, it felt like I didn’t read it at all. So-so. Not recommended.

• Big picture

  • 《人月神话》、《松本行弘的程序世界》、《软件随想录》
    The Mythical Man-Month needs no introduction. A book published in 1975 and still not outdated.
    The author of the second book, Yukihiro Matsumoto, is the father of Ruby. It’s also pretty interesting.
    The third book is by one of the founders of Stack Overflow, with a humorous writing style and very readable.
    I feel these three books help build an overall understanding of what programming is. With a big-picture view, maybe it’s easier to dive deep into individual fields later.

• Python

  • 《Python 工匠》
    I’ve wanted to learn Python (for years), but for various reasons, this was the only Python book I read this year.
    While browsing Python docs, I read Python Documents - Functional Programming HOWTO, which gives a brief intro to functional programming.
    I’d heard of it before; it was also mentioned in 《松本行弘的程序世界》 and 《软件随想录》. It feels like people are praising it everywhere. It made me curious.

• JavaScript

  • 《Eloquent JavaScript》
  • 《MDN - JavaScript reference》
    I’ve wanted to learn JavaScript (for years as well). This year I finally took action.
    I did finish Eloquent JavaScript, but the latter half was basically me skimming; I didn’t fully understand it. (To be honest I can’t claim I fully understood the first half either…)
    For example, regex: only after I hit a real problem and came back to the chapter did I understand how to use it and why.
    Also metaprogramming and async: even now, I still don’t really understand how to use them. I need to keep studying.
    Eloquent JavaScript has wide coverage, but it still doesn’t cover a lot of JS knowledge. So I use MDN - JavaScript reference to fill gaps: look up what I don’t know.

• Regular Expression

  • 《正则表达式30分钟入门教程》
    Regex is yet another thing I’ve wanted to learn for years. This time it was required at work, so it forced me to speedrun the learning.
    I pulled out this beginner regex tutorial that’s been collecting dust in my bookmarks for ages (strictly speaking, it’s an article, not a book). Combined with real needs, the results were significant. I feel like I’m about to take off.
    Aside from balancing groups / recursive matching (looks too complex and I don’t need it now), I fully mastered the other tricks in the tutorial, and can write all kinds of magical regexes to save my life.
    Life is short, learn regex

• Elixir

  • 《Learn Functional Programming with Elixir》
  • 《Elixir Documents》
    Functional programming was a completely unfamiliar field for me. But thanks to these two excellent learning materials, getting started felt less hard than I expected.
    Still digging in.

• Others

  • 《はみだしの人類学 ともに生きる方法
    I mainly read this to practice Japanese reading. The content is pretty interesting.
  • 《つまづきやすい日本語
    Also decent. I read half, then went to learn Elixir.
  • 《Plain Language Guidelines
    I want to learn English writing, but I only read a bit and never picked it up again.

Anime

I finished 47 anime works in total in 2024 (including TV series and movies).

• 2024 new anime recommendations (no particular order; just the order I finished them)
  僕の心のヤバイやつ
  ラグナクリムゾン
  デッドデッドデーモンズデデデデデストラクション
  ダンジョン飯
  変人のサラダボウル
  終末トレインどこへ行く？
  負けヒロインが多すぎる！
  きみの色
  化け猫あんずちゃん
  Robot Dreams
  葬送のフリーレン

• Older works recommendations (same: viewing order)
  天国大魔境
  四叠半神话大系
  千年女優
  劇場版 少女☆歌劇レヴュースタァライト
  秒速5センチメートル
  響け！ユーフォニアム 劇場版
  雲のむこう、約束の場所
  Summer Wars
  楽園追放
  銀河鉄道999
  命运石之门 劇場版 負荷領域のデジャヴ

One nice thing about Japan is that older movies get re-screened often. In the older works recommendations above, besides the first two TV series, all the remaining anime movies were watched in theaters.
In the past I might have wondered why I’d pay to watch works from many years ago in a cinema. But now, on one hand I have a bit more money, and on the other hand, in this era of information explosion where everything competes for your attention, using watching a movie as an excuse to disconnect from the internet helps me focus on the work in front of me and immerse myself in the world the creators built.

Okay, the above is nonsense. The real reason is: watching on a computer really does make it easy to get distracted

Novels

I did not read many novels this year. The ones that stayed with me were three in total: two Japanese light novels and one web novel.

• 信者ゼロの女神サマと始める異世界攻略
  Surprisingly not a generic overpowered power fantasy.
• 黄昏色的咏使 Vol.1
  I only read volume one, but the atmosphere hit hard enough to stick.
• 干掉男主的我被迫把自己卖给女主
  Does gender-swap yuri count as yuri? (I have now spent 114514 seconds thinking about this)

Live-Action

I watched 11 live-action films and dramas. Four stood out:

• LA LA LAND
• 東京ラブストーリー 2020ver
• 青春18×2 君へと続く道
• Civil War

Output

Blog

In 2024 I published 19 blog posts, and 12 of them were part of the Monthly Log series.
If I subtract the monthly filler posts, that leaves seven “real” posts for the year. As for quality… they are mostly written for my future self anyway.

I did want to write more technical posts, but my JavaScript and Elixir foundations still feel shallow. Quite often, a few days after learning something new, I look back and think, “Wait, isn’t this just basic common sense?” Then I start doubting whether that kind of thing even deserves to become a blog post.

But honestly, it would probably be fine to write it anyway.

So if I had to summarize the theme of my 2024 blogging, it would simply be: record myself.

Photography

In 2024 I starred more than 3,000 photos in my photo management app, and the shutter count passed 10,000. The failure rate was pretty tragic.
After shooting this much, I guess my photography improved a little, at least for landscapes. Portraits would probably still get me beaten.

Here is a recent photo: a full moon and a plane in the same frame. The focal length was too short, though, so both ended up looking smaller than I wanted.

The setup that feels most natural to me now is aperture priority plus spot metering. If I specifically need to control shutter speed, I switch over to full manual.
And even though the A7C2 is already one of the lightest full-frame cameras around, I still hesitate every time I go out: do I really want to carry it today? Because once the camera comes, the bag comes too, and then the load starts stacking up.
Currently tempted by the Ricoh GR3 HDF

Since buying a camera, my blog images and desktop wallpapers have basically become fully self-supplied. No need to search online. No copyright headaches.
During Lunar New Year, I suddenly had the idea of printing some photos from trips with friends and turning them into small photo albums as gifts.
In an age where everyone can scroll endlessly through phone galleries, a physical album with only a handful of pictures, something you can actually touch, somehow feels more precious instead.

At least I think this kind of gift is more interesting 😋 (whether the recipient agrees is a separate question)

For printing, I use the self-service photo kiosks at Yodobashi or Bic Camera. At 50 yen per print, they are not expensive.
The problem is that, despite carrying the Fuji name, the results are only… acceptable.
The colors are often off compared with what I see on my monitor, and the machine tends to boost exposure by itself, so images that look fine on screen can come out with blown highlights.
I still have not found a photo-printing service that is both more reliable and still reasonably cheap.

Expenses

“Where did all the money go?” Ever since I started keeping accounts, I no longer have this problem. That is a lie. Every month, when I review the ledger, I still end up asking myself: I do not feel like I spent that much, so why is the total so high?
Still, bookkeeping does help. Even if month-end settlement makes your vision go dark every single time, at least it tells you clearly where the money actually went. Food? Drinks? Fun? Hobbies? No. Rent.

My spending in 2023 was too unstable to be representative, since that was my first year in Japan. By 2024 life had settled down, so this is the first year that feels worth analyzing a little.
Partly this is a way to review last year’s consumption with real numbers instead of vague impressions. Partly it is also me trying to build an objective baseline for judging future spending.

Spending habits differ too much from person to person for direct comparison, but if someone is curious about the cost of living in Japan, maybe this can still serve as one data point.

Basic situation: one person, one cat, working in Tokyo, no particularly money-burning hobbies, fairly homebody, and no travel last year.
Total spending in 2024: about 3 million yen.

Breakdown:

• Clothing, less than 4%
  Less than 10,000 yen a month on average. I have basically no standards for clothing. MUJI, Uniqlo, plus BookOff solves everything.

• Food, about 20%
  Around 50,000 yen a month on average, including meals, drinks, and the occasional snack.
  I do not pursue food in any serious way either. I am too lazy to study cooking. If I go to the office, lunch is usually some random 1,000-yen place nearby. Other meals are improvised at home, usually with semi-prepared food because it takes less effort. I may eat out with friends one to three times a week.
  At 50,000 yen a month, this feels pretty middle-of-the-road. I have friends who spend 100,000 yen a month on delivery, and I have also seen cases online where a family of three gets by on 40,000 yen.
  This part really comes down to personal habits.

• Housing, about 50%
  The biggest category by far, including rent, utilities, internet, and phone plan.
  Fixed living costs swallow half of the entire year, and they are exactly the expenses you cannot really cut.
  My rent is on the expensive side among my friends, mainly because renting with a pet in Japan requires landlord approval, and being a foreigner already makes apartment hunting hard mode. Put the two together and the number of viable listings becomes tiny.
  In the end, the only real solution was to pay more, and that got me my current place: conveniently located for commuting, and also a standard modern salaryman studio tiny pigeon cage.
  I have thought about moving more than once, but the upfront cost is too high, and if luck turns against me I could easily move into someplace even worse. At that point it would be too late to regret it.
  So for now: I endure.

• Transportation, about 4%
  Public transport in Japan is not cheap. The JR base fare starts at 148 yen, and a round trip to anywhere slightly farther away can easily go over 1,000 yen.
  The small consolation of salaryman life is that commuting costs get reimbursed by the company. If you have a commuter pass (定期券), you can sometimes even piggyback on it for weekend outings and save a little.
  Since I do not go out much on weekends, most of this category is probably commuting anyway. Yes, it gets reimbursed, but splitting it out separately is annoying, so I just leave it all in the ledger.

• Electronics, about 12%
  It looks a bit high, because it is a bit high. The main reason was buying a Sony GM 50mm F1.4, which alone made up more than half of this category.
  So yes, I may have just said I have no expensive hobbies, but camera gear clearly disagrees.

  I already have the rationalizations prepared: buy early, enjoy early; buy late, still no discount, camera gear holds value, the longer you use it, the lower the average cost, this is fixed-asset investment and should be amortized over its useful life…

• Entertainment, about 5%
  Movies, exhibitions, events, merch, and similar things.
  I probably watch two or three films a month. I do not buy large anime merchandise such as figures, mostly because there is nowhere to put them.
  Two-dimensional people may be easy money, but not that easy from me

• Other, about 5%
  Cat expenses such as food and litter, occasional medical costs for myself, regular dental visits, and the usual pile of small miscellaneous spending all go here.

  Thankfully there was no major illness this year.

3 million yen a year works out to about 250,000 yen a month. Looking back, that level of spending feels fairly reasonable. I hope the new year, already one and a half months underway, can stay roughly on this track.

Mindset Changes

It has now been almost two years since I moved to Japan at the start of 2023.

Year One: Anxiety

Looking back now, my first year was defined by impatience. My Japanese was effectively mute-level, so daily life felt clumsy and exhausting. On top of that, I had switched industries to work in IT, and my programming ability was basically nonexistent.

At the time I was obsessed with one question: how do I improve my technical skills and Japanese as fast as possible? Every time I met someone, I wanted to ask how they got started and what advice they had for newcomers. Whoever I listened to sounded convincing.

But neither technical skill nor Japanese can be leveled up overnight. Looking back, I was like a headless fly, anxious all day about how to do things, while the amount of real action I took was actually pretty limited.

Year Two: Lying Flat Letting Things Settle

It was not until the second year that I finally started to loosen up a little. I became less desperate for quick results. I let myself slow down and keep moving at my own pace instead.

On the Japanese side, I do feel there has been visible progress, maybe partly because the first year finally started to compound. Listening improved the most; I can understand more now. Speaking has improved too, though it is still very much patchwork Japanese.

On the technical side, I finally settled down and started learning JavaScript seriously. I also more or less figured out regex, and discovered Elixir, which still looks extremely interesting to me.

It is funny: some seniors who once looked amazingly strong now feel much more ordinary in hindsight, and some pieces of advice that sounded deeply reasonable at the time no longer feel obviously right.
More importantly, I have gradually started to suspect that the overall level of Japan’s IT industry may simply be… not that high. Though perhaps that says more about the projects I have touched than the whole industry.

Why Do People Have to Work?.jpg

In the second half of 2024, I entered a very stereotypically Japanese development project.
There was endless meaningless work done purely to make the process look rigorous, Excel-driven development, obsessive perfectionism applied to utterly stupid things, and so on and so on.
That experience taught me, very directly, what the emptiness of work feels like.

For roughly half a year after joining the project, a few questions kept circling in my head:
What is the point of this job?
What is the point of life?
What kind of life do I actually want?

Doing meaningless work forced me to think about those cliché questions I had previously been able to ignore. I still do not have clean answers, but I did at least become a little clearer about a few things while thinking through them.

• The first is that a lot of what people call worldly success, brands, luxury goods, expensive cars, big houses, does not actually attract me very much.
  If 3 million yen is enough to cover a year’s basic expenses, then grinding away too much mental energy on work starts to feel like a bad trade.
• The second is this: if one day I no longer needed to worry about visas, and further still no longer had to worry about money, how would I use my time? What would I choose to do?
  Right now I only have vague directions, not a firm answer.
• And the third has to do with time itself. I increasingly feel that time that belongs to me is something I should protect on purpose.
  Rather than spending energy chasing tiny advantages, or forcing myself into boring social gatherings just to collect shallow acquaintances, I would rather watch anime, take a walk by the river, or simply sleep. Those things feel much more like actually using time for myself.

So if I had to summarize my 2024 mindset shift:

1. I evolved, or perhaps degenerated, from an energetic newbie into a salaryman who feels like commuting to a grave.
2. I am still thinking about what kind of life I want to live.
3. I have become stingy about giving away time that belongs to me.

Closing

Whether 2024 leaves behind more regret, more satisfaction, or some mix of the two, it is over either way.
That is enough looking back. Next comes looking ahead to 2025, even if we are already one and a half months into it.

1. Keep improving my technical skills and Japanese, so I can get a little closer to the life I actually want
2. Stay healthy, and hopefully let the people around me stay healthy too, without major illness or disaster
3. World peace

Everything except improving my technical skills and Japanese is basically beyond my control anyway, so call it nonsense if you want.

If I had to reduce all of 2024 to one sentence, it would be this: keep leveling up professionally, and take proper care of myself and the cat.

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Anyway, belated though it is, happy new year.